out of the gate, as Sort Of was launched by Jansz and Ellingham initially to publish their friend Chris Stewart’s memoir of buying a run-down Andalusian farmhouse, Driving Over Lemons. The couple were in the midst of sell- ing Rough Guides to Penguin. Jansz says: “We tried to put his book together and get him a publisher, just as mates. I was helping with the structure, being the editor without actually being a publisher at the time. And then Mark had this idea of…” Ellingham comes in: “[Stewart] didn’t really trust publishers and had it in his head that it was terribly important for him to make £10,000 from the book as he needed to buy a tractor. So, I asked Penguin if we could [set up Sort Of] and publish it and they distribute it. They said, ‘Fine, as long as you don’t publish more than three books a year’.”
“I think it was five, Mark,” Jansz says. Ellingham consid-
ers. “Perhaps five eventually, but at first it was three. Anyway, we printed 10,000 copies in the first run, and we have sold more than 1.5 million.” Jansz locks eyes with me: “Including export.”
The graduates
Jansz and Ellingham have been together since they met at the Universit of Bristol in the 1980s, and this sort of exchange is regular: overlapping sentences, some mild and teasing disagreements on facts, Jansz oſten comically pointing in the air when she wants to make a point of order. The story of how Karunatilaka came into the fold, which is a complicated one, is told with similar bantering. The writer had been on Sort Of’s radar for some time: Jansz is Sri Lankan and a cousin had sent Karunatilaka’s 2012 début, Chinaman, which the author had originally self-published. Sort Of wanted to acquire it but was too late, as Penguin Random House India and Jonathan Cape swooped in.
But Sort Of kept in touch. Ellingham met Karunatilaka in Sri Lanka and told him Chinaman should have won the Booker (“I think that stuck in his mind”); Jansz wrote to tell the author she would be happy to be a second reader on his next book, even if Sort Of had no skin in the game, “as I was going to end up reading whatever he wrote next anyway”. PRH had Indian subcontinent rights to his next book and was on the cusp of publishing what would become Seven Moons… when Karunatilaka, having doubts, got in touch with Sort Of to ask if it was really ready for publication. For Sort Of, the answer was no. Ellingham says: “There was clearly a great, monumental work in there, but it was just a bit confusing. A lot of things needed to be sorted out and there could be a much beter, more coherent book.” PRH India ploughed on, however, and published the original manuscript as Chats with the Dead (“an amusing title, but perhaps not a commercially winning title”, Ellingham says rather diplomatically.) There was another year of edits with Jansz aſter the PRH India release, before Sort Of brought out what would become the Booker- winning Seven Moons...
Chats with ot a
ays rather f edits
ore Sor oker-
This caused consternation at Booker long listing time when PRH India understandably wanted to make a splash of Karunatilaka across the subcontinent, particularly in
g- ly
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA
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Sri Lanka. Yet the two publishers had different books, so Sort Of allowed PRH to have its version, and Dyer’s now- iconic cover treatment, gratis. All three of us pause to have a chuckle contemplating, if the situation were reversed, PRH doing the same for a small indie. While the potential is huge, a big book prize win can be daunting for a small indie as it inevitably means increased production, publicit and marketing costs, though Jansz says: “We didn’t have the usual anxiet of wondering about scaling up for the Booker, simply because we started with a really big bestseller—so we have that experience of printing 20,000 to 40,000 copies in a week.” Ellingham adds: “But as a small publisher you still have a sort of five-month cashflow problem between actually geting money from those first sales when you haven’t paid your print bills. You have actually paid commission on the books that you’ve sold, without having received any of the sales income. There is a gap.”
The Booker win is not going to drastically change the business plan (although with the Seven Moons… paperback release in April, Sort Of will have its first outside advertis- ing campaign in the form of London Tube posters). Sort Of will continue to publish a small number of books it passionately believes in. For a house that releases so few titles, it has a remarkably wide-ranging list across fiction and non-fiction, including Tove Jansson’s adult publishing and Moomin hardcover giſt editions; canny classics like Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl (translated by Joel Rotenburg), which was the inspiration for Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel”; hard-boiled crime with Simon Lewis’ cop-on-the-run Inspector Jian series; and even comics in the form of Peter Blegvad’s The Book of Leviathan. Though the later is a debt repaid, as Sort Of took its name from the title of the first album by Slapp Happy, Blegvad’s 1970s avant-garde pop group. Interestingly, Sort Of has not been inundated with submissions post-Booker. Ellingham, who also works at Profile and recently commissioned titles like Adrian Chiles’ The Good Drinker, says: “I’m a litle surprised that agents aren’t a bit more creative; there are so many who don’t go beyond the big six or eight publishers. Which is crazy. If you have a novelist or non-fiction writer who isn’t an obvious six-figure advance, then oſten a small publisher—or in our case, a very small publisher—is your best hope, because every book we publish is enormously important to us and we will have the best possible design, publicit and editorial that we can.”
Jansz picks up the thread: “It’s publishing books that you feel commited to. I know all publishers are commit- ted, but a lot of times at the bigger ones you leave your opinions at the door and try to sell a book whether you like it or not. If we don’t like a book, we don’t publishllike it or no it. We’re risking a lot in each publication so we don’t take it on unless we really love it. It’s not just think- ing, ‘Will we make this pay?’, but asking whether we are real fans of it and if it is a book we are going to talk about to our closest friends.”
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opinions at t it. W e ri
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Sort Of translation rights are handled by Andrew Nurnberg, with US rights overseen by Inkwell Management.
S
Sort Of New and upcoming
Moominland Midwinter Tove Jansson; Thomas Warburton (trans) Out now, £14.99, hb, 9781908745996 The only Moomin book Jansson illustrated in full colour, available in English for the first time.
Lore Segal Ladies’ Lunch Out now, £9.99, pb, 9781914502033 A new collection of short stories by the 95-year-old Austrian- born American author and regular New Yorker contributor.
Simon Lewis No Exit 2nd November, £9.99, pb, 9781908745897 Lewis’ second Inspector Jian novel sees the detective and his daughter on the run in London, hoping to return to China. But a gang of triads has other ideas...
Kathleen Jamie Cairn 11th Jan 2024, £9.99, pb, 9781914502002 The Scottish Makar’s (national poet) newest is a collection of micro- essays, prose poems, notes and fragments.
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